Sea Dragons

Sea dragons, eh? What would you do with them?

To try to describe them, to delineate them carefully in paint or in words, is simply to invite credulous cries and sneers. What, you would say, like that leather-backed slug-shaped reptile with feathers, glimpsed late one afternoon in the Natural History Museum, the one you could never find again, that looked like an economical April Fool stitched from the remnants of animals found lying around the storerooms? Or like that lizard you saw in the Serengeti, blue to the waist and pink above, as if it were wearing sparkly jeans, or as if a man squatted behind a nearby bush, dipping denim blue lizards halfway into pots of shiny pink paint?

Elongated, calme, supercilious seahorses, the dragons float arranged in curious flocks staring through the glass. A continent of forthright, sturdy, stalwart people, a land boasting poisonous snakes and spiders, brutal marsupials, a harsh landscape, off its coast is home to these elegant, magical cratures, twigs draped in wistful, pendulous seaweed, tails long and forgotten, staring at some distant fascination, some faraway dream. The fins that keep them hovering, slowly changing their direction, are so fine as to be almost invisible: the seaweed-like fronds drift about them, delicately careless.

If they were land dragons, you would expect fire, a thin, piercing flame from that precise snout. If they were seahorses, it would be something less supple, more active, jolly and real like a favourite pony. But these are dragons, the inhabitants of legends, no more real than mermaids or fairies. How can they be described?

Deviations

I’ve taken a short break from typing and Creating Space this week to write a quick short story, not my usual field at all but great fun. For one thing, it was a delight to go back to the characters of Henry and Robert who, rather like real children, have grown up far too fast. However my helpful reader has suggested quite a few additions (I was trying hard to keep it to 2,000 so, although I have failed, it was very much pared down and apparently some of the parings should have been left where they were). Once these are done, I’ll think about how and where to make it available.

In the meantime I’m waiting for the excitement of receiving the proof copy of Knowledge of Sins Past. When the Death in a Scarlet Gown one came, the text was squint, but it was still one of the most exciting moments of my life (not sure what that says about my life, mind you!). I’ve already started preparing Service of the Heir and then it’s straight on to An Abandoned Woman. I want to have them all out by September – not sure when Fellowship with Demons is going to appear, as I’m still stuck for a cover. Swords? Demons? Music? A soldier?

I’ve also been doing a bit of archaeological digging. For years (well, since I was at school) I’ve kept a book called, unimaginatively, the Blue Book (yes, it’s blue), in which I have written down the traditional notes, observations and ideas that all writers really ought to write down. It’s about the one good habit I’ve managed to maintain for xxxx years, that and brushing my teeth. I noticed a reference in it to Blair, and it was a bit earlier than I had expected, so I did some more digging and found this:

16^th. June, 1987: The bumbling professor had been quiet for some time, happily sucking at his mug of soup in the corner. There fell a pause in the conversation, which after a moment he broke.

‘Those biscuits are rather unexciting, aren’t they? Boring. They looked so nice in the shop, on their little carousel, and I like a greedy old man bought up the lot, thinking “Yum, yum!” But now they’re not very exciting.’ His voice sighed away.

I used this in An Abandoned Woman, having forgotten where it had come from. But a professor? Then Blair developed into a more investigative role:

1^st. October 1987: ‘The policemen (Blair and Ben, of course) ...’

A bit more investigation revealed that Ben was an even older character, a kind of proto-Murray but a sidekick to a senior detective who had originally been somewhat unoriginal, and had been called Thorne, I think. But Blair obviously caught my imagination, and further entries show that he was occasionally, at least, on my mind.

1^st. May, 1988: ‘Blair bumbles, his eyes half-closed under an untidy heap of prematurely white hair. He has shocking dress sense and a severe, shambling limp. He regards his cases and their characters with a puzzled and almost saintly benevolence. Sees a great deal without appearing to notice.’

11^th. May, 1988: ‘Blair is Scottish, remember. Shamble, bumble, trundle, absent, vacant, aloof, innocent.’

4^th. May, 1989: ‘Blair bumbled around the room, and Ben saw that he wore a daisy chain, like a parenthetic irrelevance, on one wrist.’

‘The carrier bag hung forgotten from his hand like the pollen sac on a bee closed into a sunlit room. He blundered, humming, from window to wall to door.’

13^th. June, 1989: ‘Blair’s eyes bleared at him.’

7^th. January, 1990: ‘I think Blair (or McAlester?) should talk more.’

18^th. November, 1993: ‘Blair doesn’t wear clothes, they happen to him.’

31^st. December, 1993: ‘Ben and Blair are characterised by their movements: Ben can sit absolutely still, but Blair must always be moving, jigging or shuffling or rocking.’

27^th. April, 1994: ‘Well, it’s just funny that she shouldn’t have known what time it was. You see, she’s the kind of person who’s always looking at her watch.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Blair meaningfully, ‘she’s the kind of person who is always looking at their watch but never knows what time it is.’

The informer looked at Ben in bewilderment.

This Blair was set firmly in the present day, I think as a policeman in Edinburgh. By this stage I was living in Edinburgh and had at least two plots squared out for him to investigate: one of them involved a huge chart on my bedroom wall showing where each character was at any given time in one week. They had their merits, and bits of them might resurface some day, but without Blair now, of course. None of this could be usefully transferred to the early 1800s:

29^th. August, 1994: ‘Every contact leaves a trace,’ Blair reminded him firmly. Then he moved away, singing in a breathy whisper to the tune of The Archers,

“Every contact leaves a trace,

Every cloth a fibre ...”’

30^th. October, 1994: ‘There was a soft wheeping noise, growing more insistent.

“One of us is bleeping,” said Blair.

Ben thought about it.

“It’s not me, sir.”

The wheeps continued.’

Ben was an artist, I seem to remember, rather good at watercolours and a dab hand with a fullbore rifle. But alas, he has never escaped from the pages of the Blue Book – who knows, some time he might?

Ah, well, back to typing and drawing!

The earth is calling!

Back to Allotment Major on Tuesday to dig the second half of my hotbed. Bucket of fresh compostables, bag of wood and paper ash from the stove, bundle of cardboard, and knapsack with flask, all on the top deck of the bus. It's funny how I so often have a seat to myself on that bus ... Anyway, dig a hole, tip the stuff in, and cover over with the spoil. Then try to cover it with old horticultural fleece which has frozen not just to the top layer of earth but also to the rocks which held it in place. The plan is that this will produce sweetcorn and courgettes in abundance this summer - well, I saw a field of maize in the shire last summer, and N&D have been known to grow it as far north as Edinburgh. Obviously I can grow it on an exposed site in the north east of Scotland.

It was a dazzling, frosty day, when the sun caught a yellowhammer on the telephone wires and made it electric bright, and blinded me so I couldn't see the geese I could hear. Three perfect young roe deer ventured out on to the grass from the wood, antlers soft and downy.

The ground was not so frozen as the day I dug the first half of the (so-called) hot bed - then you could lift whole tops off the beds by inserting a spade at one corner and lifting.

Seeds and seed potatoes have arrived, it's the first official day of spring, the sun is shining and the garden and allotments are calling. I'm trying some new techniques this year, involving collecting rotting wood - more interesting things to take on the bus!

So many other things are calling too, though: house cleaning now the sunlight is showing up the dust; knitting, beading, and all those other too tempting crafts; the actual paying jobs; a whole heap of books; and of course writing. I can't say I'm entirely happy with the way it's going: I'm not sure if one would call it a complex plot or just messy, or whether the mess is in my mind (which has far, far too many things going on in it). Is it just a duff book, or is this pre-publication black dog? I'm not in a position to judge!

Slow progress

Fellowship with Demons (nee Kith and Kin) is the last of the Murray books that I completed in the 1990s: there's another half one, the next one, which I slightly fear coming back to in mid-stream, as it were. I don't know why, but my mind keeps bubbling away with plot ideas for the one after the one after the half-written one, while the in-between one is still very hazy.

The technique so far has been to reread the old (dusty) typescript (somewhere there's a rigid floppy or whatever they were for each book, but there's not a machine left in the house to read them), with the firm intention of making notes for improvements, corrections, etc. Then I set to to retype. I'm glad I invested a little of my very tiny startin salary on a touch typing course long ago - at my school one didn't learn such things as one was expected to have a secretary in one's workplace! At my second post I was strongly advised not to let slip that I had a typing qualification in case it was thought that I should be in the typing pool, not in a 'professional' post. Oh, happy days! Anyway, I'm glad of it now, as I edit as I go. The trouble is, I try to read it as if reading it for the first time, and then I think - 'But why doesnt' Blair say X here?' and I rewrite a whole passage to make Blair convincingly say X only to find two pages later that he does say / will say / has said X, but much more effectively, or that there's a pressing reason why he shouldn't say it at all. I correct lots of mistakes, but of course as I'm retyping I'm introducing brand new shiny mistakes. I've changed the name of Murray's cook three times (who noticed she has two different names? That's going to have to be fixed!). All this time I'm trying to think of a cover illustration that is (a) practical and (b) cheap, preferably free. Then I print the whole thing off and proofread, correct, and face the great moment of uploading on to Amazon. Actualy, it would make more sense to upload to Smashwords first, as they do an automated format check which is somewhere between useful and annoying (they're very picky about just how the copyright page has to look, for example). Each version needs an ISBN from my precious store - just bought a new batch.

I'm trying to set up Books 2 - 4 on CreateSpace before the summer, which is another faff. To be fair, Amazon does try to make it easy and I'm pretty pleased with Death in a Scarlet Gown in print (thanks as always to my patient and computer literate graphic designer), but it is a fiddle getting everything into templates and stop it looking like a text book.

None of this is, of course, marketing 'the product', something I'm really going to have to work on. This is not my field. This is so far from being my field that I feel like a slug in the Sahara - moreover, an Aberdonian slug in the Sahara (probably in the oil industry). For anyone who doesn't know, the common perception in England that the Scots are, shall we say, emotionally attached to a firmly closed wallet, is in Scotland itself directed at Aberdonians. I don't like to spend money. It's one of those irregular verbs: I am careful, you are stingy, he, she or it is as mean as a miser's mother. But apparently it pays to advertise ...

South

Just back from a few days in Broadstairs on the coast of Kent, where the sleet was horizontal but the hospitality was warm. I first met our hostess many years ago in London, when I moved there from St. Andrews, not long after the release of that wonderful film, Chariots of Fire.  You'll remember, perhaps, the opening sequence of the athletes training, running along a long, flat beach, with the caption 'Broadstairs, Kent'. So when she said that was where she lived, I said, 'Oh, yes, at the beginning of Chariots of Fire.' 'Oh, no!' she said, affronted. 'I don't know where it was but it wasn't Broadstairs!' 'No!' I said, with just as much affrontedness, 'it was St. Andrews!'. (I shan't trouble you with the additional story of an American acquaintance who, having tried to simulate the opening sequence one night by stripping to his underwear on West Sands, St. Andrews, and running boldly up and down the beach, then spent several chilly hours trying to find which dunes he had hidden his clothes behind ...).

Broadstairs is a lovely, quirky town, full of odd little houses of all ages tucked into awkward corners, including one or two that Charles Dickens didn't stay in. Another frequent visitor was Wilkie Collins, who was staying with Dickens when a glimpse of the lighthouse at night inspired the title of his novel The Woman in White. There are local tales of Viking invasions and smuggling, and the beach, which is hidden below the town, is lined with bathing huts and, in February, sulky turnstones and busy sanderlings running at the edges of the waves.

We took a quick train to Canterbury one afternoon but it was full of English Language students and French schoolchildren. The Cathedral is beautiful but expensive!

Nine hours back on the train through varying levels of snow - imagine doing that journey in a carriage, or worse, on top of a mail coach.

http://www.visitbroadstairs.co.uk/2011town.html

Cold

The beginning of February, snow on the ground, cats secreted in unexpected nooks (the bathroom is still of interest but since No. 2 Cat did not progress to the use of an angle-grinder we’re passing no comment at present), gradually being overwhelmed by the pile of unread books taking over various parts of the house. Wool is also encroaching and I have not yet unwound the scale model of the Himalayas I intended for a rug, mostly because No.1 Cat, the elderly and best-beloved, decided it offered support for his arthritic hops and adopted it for a while.

I’m in Chapter Fifteen of Fellowship with Demons, struggling a bit (partly just to find the time to type). No chance at the moment to pay a visit to Edinburgh and stretch my legs round the Meadows and the back of South Clerk Street where I need to be. I heard a writer on the wireless the other day (blowed if I can remember her name, sorry, but Radio 4), who said she had never walked much until she became a writer, then found that her brain worked best at 3 miles per hour. I’m with Virginia Wolff (not a thing I often say, but there are one or two points of her view where we might, had occasion offered, have nodded in sage agreement and taken another sip of gin and tonic) who liked to go for walks in winter dusk in the city, when people had lit their lamps but not yet drawn their curtains, revealing tantalising playlets of their lives to the passing world.

We travelled to Lockerbie and back last weekend. May I applaud the people of Dundee for their egalitarian abandonment of the use of car indicators? It’s a fine sign of a sense of community, everyone clearly just knowing what everyone else is doing and where they’re going. Clearly someone has realised that those little orange lights are a distraction, and a rather tasteless one at that – garish orange, very Seventies (though I suppose that’s retro now). The Dundee population has abandoned their use in favour of a rather sudden flashing of delightful cherry red brakelights when the driver in front makes an unexpected manoeuvre ... Peebles, though – now that’s a nice town. I hadn’t been there since Adam was a boy, but it is a busy, practical, clean, neat, attractive town. We had a decent lunch on our way down and another in a different plase on the way back, and there were more choices we wouldn’t mind trying another day. A walk by the river, clutching our hats to our heads, a stroll around a few pleasant independent shops, and on we went. The hills haven’t changed much since my childhood, though streams of water running off the moors had frozen across the road. Still, we’d left the North-East in snow so we were lucky. The sheep were bonny and clean with a fine staple that had me reaching for my knitting needles ...

Just outside Lockerbie, the stars were a wonder. In the city we so often can only pick out the Plough and bits of Orion, so it was a delight to stand and stare, tracing half-forgotten shapes. Those Greeks had a bit of imagination, though: I’m afraid Cassiopeia is a W, and that is that!

never investigate the bathroom ...

There's something going on in the bathroom. The cats have opened the door to the cupboard under the bath (contents: the usual back up bottles of shampoo and back log of contact lenses) and are spending a great deal of time interested in it, and now Number Two Cat has been found there with an allan key ...